I blog for a while now. Looking back I had a personal blog about things I'm interested in some years during my study. I did a comedic fake news page, too. My wife and I write a blog about our baby and I also have an IBM internal blog about SAN troubleshooting. Last year I started with seb's sanblog on developerworks and it was quite a slow start. Beginning of 2011 there was much stuff to do for my primary job on one hand but on the other hand my daughter was born and my interests shifted a bit. As I write the articles for this blog mainly during my spare time, the simple equation was: no spare time = no blog posts.

Midyear 2011 the situation improved a bit. My baby Johanna was out of the woods somehow (is "to be out of the woods" really the English term for finishing the most stressful phase?) after her hip dysplasia was cured and I was able to really start to blog. And then I thought about: What do you want to blog about? There is so much going on in the storage industry, but am I really the best person to blog about them? Can I really add some value with blog articles here? I don't think so. Of course I comment on such topic on other people's blogs, twitter or social platforms like linkedin from time to time. After all there's always some FUD around I cannot resist to comment. But I try to keep my own blog really about SAN and storage virtualization with a focus on troubleshooting.

I wrote 19 articles in 2011. That's not much compared to let's say storagebod. Why is that so? Well, for me it's quite a balancing act what I can blog about. Of course I can't blog about a specific customer having a problem. That's a no-go. There are also things I don't want to blog about because there is already much out there about it. And then there is stuff that I just can't blog about, because it's internal information. Special troubleshooting procedures I created for example or information about internal tools and projects I'm involved.

What remains then?

Oh, there's still enough to blog about. If I notice situations like "Hey, I explained this general thing in four cases now to customers completely unaware of it." or if I see a feature that could really help admins but hardly anyone uses it so far, then I write a blog article. I see it more as an additional explanation and food for thought. My target audience consists of customers on the "doing level" (admins, architects) as well as people troubleshooting SANs. I know that's a significantly smaller group than the audience of the more general storage bloggers, but I'm happy if the right people read it and I get the feedback that my blog helped them with their problems. However I started to count the visitors internally since end of July and so far around 32000 visited seb's sanblog. That's not too bad, I think.

Writing such a résumé I want to thank the people who inspired me to start a blog. First of all there are Barry Whyte and Tony Pearson with their developerworks blogs showing me: there are actually IBMers out there writing about my topics of interest. Reading their blogs brought me to many others - also from other companies - that I try to look in daily. Most of them you see in the list on the right bar of this blog. But a special Thank you! goes out to my Australian colleague Anthony Vandewerdt whose blog has a big focus on the people really working with IBM storage products and therefore SAN products as well. His Aussie Storage Blog on developerworks triggered my decision to start an own external blog. Thank you again!

So what to expect from 2012?

To be honest, I have no idea :o) There is no overall plan. No weeks-long article pipeline. I'm not invited in blogger events or something like that and my blog is in no way a marketing channel for upcoming IBM products. Everything I write is just born out of my experience with SAN products and troubleshooting. I try not to write too much about hypes and trends, except it has a direct impact on SAN - like oversaturated hypervisors turning to slow drain devices or Big Data as an excuse to do some really weird things with your storage architecture :o)

Are you still interested?

Then be my guests in 2012 and if you feel the urge to say something about, against or additional to an article, don't hesitate to leave a comment! Have a nice start into the New Year!